Our customers occasionally ask us for tea bag and tea pyramids. Our response is "Sorry we don't carry those."
The reasons are quite simple. Tea bags, while they are quite easy, they do not provide the best tea flavor possible. The tea in tea bag teas are called fannings, or tea dust, and they are produced mostly to give color and not flavor. Open a tea bag up and look. You will find fine tea dust.
It's a bit like comparing instant coffee to quality roasted coffee beans freshly grounded. Tea bags, if you haven't guessed, is the instant coffee in this analogy.
A huge "improvement" in teabags is the pyramid tea bag or sachet. These larger tea bags are usually filled with better tea. However, these bags are not environmentally friendly at all. They are sometimes called "silken" but they are usually made from plastic or nylon.
READ OUR NEWER BLOG POST ON PLASTICS IN YOU TEA
This is the small print from a website selling these "Silken Pyramids" . "Silken pyramid infusers are not compostable or biodegradable. Pyramid infusers are not microwaveable." They aren't microwavable because the plastic would melt. It makes me worry a bit about the chemicals leeching into your hot tea.
If you like the convenience of tea bags, we suggest our DIY brew bags. These are unbleached, empty tea bags, which you can fill with your favorite teas. They are made of wood pulp harvested from managed sustainable forests and are totally compostable and biodegradable.
If you want to be even more earth-friendly, you can use a quality stainless steel infuser that will last a lifetime.
If you're looking for more reasons to avoid bagged teas, we wrote a whole other blog post about it here.
Don't even get me going on K cups.
Happy sipping.
To see our complete line of infusers and tea steeping products click here